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Scarecrow - The Eight Letters: Collect eight Letters that are scattered within the house and garden - but watch out for the scarecrow

About This Game

A one-of-a-kind horror shocker – a game aware of your fear!

An old abandoned mansion lies at the dead end of Pineview Drive. A troubled man is standing at its gates, looking over the property. 20 years ago he had visited this estate with his wife Linda. During their stay his beloved vanished without a trace – her mysterious disappearance unresolved.

For 20 years no clues, for 20 years no peace, for 20 years this house on Pineview Drive has not relinquished its tormenting grip on him. Now, he returns in hopes of coming to terms with his nightmarish past.

The ominous legends haunting this seaside lodge have become renown. The stories abound that no one has been able to endure more than 30 days within the mansion since Linda’s disappearance. Facing a force greater than you ever imagined, you must cross the threshold and confront the evil that envelops this cryptic cottage. To solve the mystery of Linda’s disappearance and lift the veil on this troubling history, there is no time to spare.

Features

The game watches your every move and reaction - you will need steady nerves if you want to survive the game unscathed. In this extraordinary gaming experience, any trace of fear comes at a price – your life. Get ready for a ground-breaking spine-chiller.

30 in-game days: Each one allows you to delve further into the secrets of the house on Pineview Drive

Every move and reaction is being watched: Do not get yourself worked up or you will lose precious health

Premium sound scenery and effects: Every tone will run your blood cold

Breathtaking horror atmosphere: Face your deepest fears within the house

Additional game modes (introduced with Update 1.5):

Open House Today: Explore the mansion in bright daylight

Scarecrow - The Eight Letters: Collect eight Letters that are scattered within the house and garden - but watch out for the scarecrow

I am currently unemployed, and sometimes worry that others may be "right" when they opine that I should NOT be waking up as late as 3 or 4pm in the afternoon. I am glad to see that this game has cured me of any such concerns, as our main protagonist, in spite of having set himself a task of exploring a spooky haunted mansion over the course of thirty days, seemingly elects to get up no earlier than 5-5.30pm each and every day (judging by how quickly the sun goes down). And considering how low he is on flashlight batteries and matches - indeed, did not even think to bring any with him, but as luck would have it, they are intermittently dispersed throughout said mansion - this is perhaps not the wisest of strategies. Alas, a work ethic is a work ethic, and if he feels he is most efficient at night, I can only empathise. Like a male ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥, it would seem both myself and the hero of Pineview Drive do our best work after dark. (It's a burden sometimes, but someone must be up to the task.)

It would also appear that our protagonist is either an avid horror gamer himself, or failing that, someone aspiring to join the team of the Most Haunted TV series. Because for whatever reason - "searching for clues" which have something to do with his wife, apparently - he gets up every evening, at the crack of sunset, and wanders around the house just HOPING something spooky will happen. He searches the same rooms, over and over again, night after night, to see what spooky tricks the mansion might have to throw at him THIS time...as sooner or later, one of these spooky events is destined to lead to the finding of yet another KEY.

Yes...sigh...it's one of THOSE games.

In fact, whereas other horror and/or first-person games intersperse door-locking "puzzles" with slight variations on the theme, such as turning cranks or, well, actually solving PUZZLES perhaps, this one pretty much operates on the principle of forever looking for a key which wasn't there five seconds before said spookiness occurred. Well, okay, sometimes it takes a smidgen longer than five seconds to acquire the key...for example, you might be standing near some windows and hear some creepy childish laughter, and look out the window to see a ghostly young lady on a set of swings outside. So what does our humble hero do next? Well, like we all would, he decides it's time to venture outside, into a storm, in the middle of a dark and spooky night, and check out the swings...I mean, we'd all do that, right? ♥♥♥♥ waiting 'til the next day, and DAY-LIGHT...let's go outside right this second, at a time of optimum eeriness, just so we can unnecessarily scare ourselves ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ whilst obtaining yet another key (which would, presumably, still be there in the morning or afternoon if we'd only wait).

This "logic" is by no means the worst of the game's problems, however. Scenarios like the one I just described, while a tad bemusing, are frankly a God-send compared to the numerous bits in the game where you simply HAVE NO ♥♥♥♥ING IDEA WHAT TO DO NEXT. Fortunately, after about ten or so minutes of fruitless wandering about, your character will eventually muse something aloud like, "I don't know why, but I have a feeling I should go and check the children's room again"...which, while a bit LATE in coming, would still be something of a God-send IF WE COULD ACTUALLY REMEMBER WHERE THE CHILDREN'S ROOM IS. If ever a game needed a map...THIS IS THAT GAME; not just to help find a room we know we're specifically looking for, but indeed to save us walking up to almost every single door in the house (which consists of several floors, AND several wings) to see which one our latest key might happen to fit...which is to say, a map could have clearly shown us which doors we HAVEN'T managed to unlock as of yet, narrowing things down a bit. Something as simple as that could have saved THIS particular gamer, at the very least, a good few hours of unnecessary gameplay, and significantly tightened up the pacing and structure of the game while we're at it. Wouldn't that have been nice? Just a thought.

Oh, and I haven't yet mentioned the game's supposedly innovative "fear-detection" system...which basically adds up to you losing a bit of "health" every time you jerk the mouse too suddenly after a scare, or keep the run button held down during such encounters, or...something like that. Personally, I found this little feature to be almost null-and-void for the first twenty-nine chapters, as I barely ever took "damage" anyway. That is, until Day 30, at which point the balance completely flips in the opposite direction and you can barely even MOVE FORWARD without the game interpreting said "violent" motion as sheer-and-utter-horror on your behalf. It's a bit poorly-executed, in other words, and kinda borderline pointless even if it HAD been flawlessly implemented. Still, I'm sure it was a nice idea on paper, a bit like the first Amnesia's almost equally pointless "sanity" system. Full points for trying something different, though...

Now, if it sounds like I'm giving this game a hard rap, don't believe a second of it. I actually really, really liked this game. At least until the bewildering final chapter and the ludicrously baffling final cut-scene which follows it. Sure the game's a tad long (THIRTY DAYS? Was it really necessary for us to endure THIRTY DAYS?!), rather repetitive, and not really all that "scary" ("spooky" is definitely the more appropriate word, as it's ultimately more bark than bite)...but other than this, if you were the kind of kid, like yours truly, who used to enjoy wandering around abandoned schoolyards and empty old houses at night in some attempt to try and scare yourself silly, this is the kind of game you can probably get behind. But be warned: You really DO need to be that kind of person, who enjoys EXPLORING things, and RE-EXPLORING them, and RE-EXPLORING THEM AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN, or else this is gonna bore you stupid in no time; not least of all because the occasional "hints" as to where to go next are generally few and far between.

In all fairness, this IS a tiny bit more than just a "walking simulator" - you can at least add "key-finding simulator", "door-unlocking simulator" and "note-finding simulator" to that list - but there isn't a great deal more to it than that. Like any good horror game, it's really just the vaguest semblance of a "plot", ultimately serving as an excuse for the game to throw a certain number of super-atmospheric and spooky "set-pieces" your way. If this is the kind of thing you consider entertaining, then by all means, come inside...just remember to wear your halo, though, 'cause THAT's the level of patience you're gonna need to make it all the way to the final cut scene (though if you made it all the way through this rather long-winded review, I guess you're part-way to Sainthood already)!

I don't know how this game has so many positive reviews. All you do, for thirty game days, is find keys and try them in all 200 doors of the house until you get the right one. The house becomes a maze, so by the time you're 1/3 of the way through, it becomes difficult to find doors you haven't unlocked yet. In addition to that, the house becomes completely dark at around the same time, and your flashlight batteries last about 2 minutes (I've just run out of batteries, by the way, and can't see ♥♥♥♥). There is no indication of what you're supposed to do, so you basically have to go into each room every time after something happens, every day, to see if something is going to happen there so you can get another key to open some unknown, random door.

My main emotions have been consistent boredom and frustration rather than fear. I don't even notice half of the "scares" because it's too dark. It also seems like you lose health if you start moving the camera around when something spooky is happening (detecting your "fear"). The problem with this is that I'm not scared -- I just want to see some content to this game other than spending hours doing nothing but checking doors. Pretty much the only way I ever can tell that anything is happening is that I hear dramatic music.

I didn't finish the story, and at this point I don't give a crap about it if it means I have to spend several more hours d***ing around with the same doors. You find one note at the end of each day -- that's the story. Considering that these notes are one sentence long, I don't think there is much substance here, anyway. The notes haven't even been slightly interesting so far.

Also, the walking is slow. It's so slow that I feel like the game is majorly lagging every time I walk instead of run. You can sprint, but I think that also makes you lose health if you do it while something is happening. Obviously, we are running in this stupid game because we're scared, not because we don't want to check a giant mansion of doors at a turtle's pace 30 days in a row.

I can't even express how bad this game is. I liked Gone Home, but the lack of personality in the environments in this game is unacceptable. This is even crappier than Gun Monkeys if you really think about it, which is the standard for crap as far as I'm concerned.

+ great atmosphere, great use of lightning and sound effects, nice graphics that fit the setting+ gameplay is about exploring and finding keys to unlock the rooms in the house and later on on some external locations - you rely on your flashback and matches to light candles since you have very little time at the start of each day until it gets really dark - the game is long enough, consists of 30 days, each day ends by reading a note that explains the story - simple controls and simple gameplay , it's all about exploring and getting in the mood of the game.+ some jump scares are pretty original - the game also doesn't rely on them to frighten the player rather on the great atmosphere, i found some sound effects creepier than anything i saw so far in the game.

- story is simple and not explained in detail- lots of backtracking makes it frustrating sometimes - often player looses direction until there is an event that is triggered and gives you hint on where to go

i really like the game so far, was expecting less to be honest, it's exactly the kind of indie horror/mystery game i enjoy playing. highly recommended to fans of the genre.

Usually, horror games feel like regular games, only without gameplay and with dimmer lights, and the tension is built more through ominous music, eerie noises and jump scares, and the whole genre relies heavily on how much your mind is willing to work to fill the gaps and especially on how loud you can scream and clown around while streaming it.Which is a pity, as the horror genre relies on character development, mystery and conflict in order to deliver its effects, alongside the mandatory creepy vibe. Pineview Drive gets the atmosphere part right to some effect, but it unfortunately lacks the necessary depths to immerse one in its world and offer a truly thrilling experience.The story is delivered in short bursts that are unfortunately too vague and unengaging to hook you and make you interested in sticking around long enough to find what’s going on. There are no puzzles, there is no action, there is pretty much nothing to do but look around for keys randomly left around that unlock random doors to new rooms that have little to offer.The game relies a bit too much on our innate fear of the dark. It feels genuinely creepy at times, but more often than not, you are stuck circling endlessly at a very slow pace, attempting to find something new or something that you missed during your previous rounds.The overall experience is very tedious and slow, as Pineview Drive doesn’t even allow you to grab an axe (that you stumble upon, just can’t pick up) and smash doors open, and coerces you into being the perfect gentleman, who doesn’t stoop to breaking windows with rocks or jumping over the fence just because he doesn’t have the right key to open a lock.It’s disappointing really, because there’s not much going on, you have to constantly backtrack, and there is no reaction to the various instances of tame poltergeist such as furniture pieces piled on top of one another and other such weird occurrences.The gameplay revolves around looking for keys and feels very contrived and lacks the kind of flow that would allow the developer to get away with this.Pineview Drive advertises itself as a game that knows when you’re afraid, and thus gauges your reaction to sudden noises and other such things, but does nothing to tell you what you’re supposed to do in such a situation.Luckily, your health pool is pretty generous and these moments do not come up very often. It’s in a way better than older games that threw monsters at you and had you smash them upside the head with a sledgehammer, but it would still need a bit more interactivity in order to function properly.You won’t be attacked by anything in a physical sense and you won’t even explicitly see bizarre apparitions, not in the beginning at least, since you’ll be too busy backtracking and searching for letters from your disappeared wife, that mysteriously pop up around the house.Further in your journey, the electrical lights will cease to function, making everything even more annoying. The overall vibe of the game is that it’s less about being a horror game but more along the lines of a reminder to pack camping gear unless you like to wander aimlessly in the dark.When there’s light, the game looks pretty good, especially the vegetation, but it also requires quite a bit of processing power to do so. Walking around the garden in the middle of the day was pretty enjoyable, if uneventful.If you like horror games where there is nothing much to do, you’ll most likely enjoy its atmosphere, in spite of its slow pace. Unfortunately, the creepy vibe that the game nails is not enough to carry all of it, especially due to the slim narrative, which severely detracts from the entire experience.Overall 6/10.

Please not buy this game, it starts out good but then youre just walking through the same rooms over and over, day after day, with so little light it hurts your eyes. By the end I never wanted to play this game again. And if youre thinking the ending will be worth it, i will save you a great deal of wasted time and tell you now it is not at all worth it. In any way. At all.

This game has amazing atmosphere and is truly an awesome experience but there are things about this game that cripple it for me. For one they need to put in a REAL day/night cycle. The one in this game is fake, no other way to put it. It's also very, very, dark. When most of the game is played at night its extreamly hard to see anything infront of you. They released a prequel to this where the problem was fixed and worked very well!

This game has great potential and shows the skill of the developers but theres problems in the gameplay that make the experience more frustrating than fun. But uniquely horrifying non the less :)

Pineview Drive is all about being alone at night in a haunted mansion. Even though this sounds like an overused scenario, the game makes use of some clever scares.

If you like house exploration, almost no story and creepy atmospheres (think Gone Home), this is for you. If you hate searching for tons of keys opening tons of doors, walking in pitch black rooms and not being able to fight, this is not for you.

This might be the most oppressively dull attempt at horror I've ever played.

The game is entirely too long and the gameplay boils down to finding a key to open a door and find another key. That, however, assumes you're not wandering aimlessly around the house for several minutes, wondering where you're supposed to go before the main character randomly blurts out "I heard something from <insert room here>." What's more, the scares are all recycled ideas from other media (Amnesia and The Ring in particular), several of which are repeated no less than half-a-dozen times.

This is an amazing first person ghost-horror story/adventure. Though I thought at first it was a bit slow, it crept up on me like a storm and before I realized it, I was actually frightened and obsessed with finishing. Few games have interested me as much as this one (Outlast and Slender The Arrival compare with strength of story). If you are into First Person Shooter games or lots of gore, this one isnt for you. However if you value story and substance as well an an ever increasing sense of dread, this game is for you. Lastly, this game is long compared to some of the others I have recently played. I enjoyed it for over a week while other games I can finish in a night or so. I hope this team makes more games similar to this one.

This game creeps you out. It's good. But not great. Even for people afraid of the dark, as well as people seemingly without fear alike, could get bored pretty soon if the game developers don't fix the unnatural lighting of the game engine rendering "dark room" or "night" scenes. Even with all settings set to full it disappoints at moments. Day-time outside lighting is great. But if they could fix the unnatural lighting in the "dark", the game would be even better than it is now, and it's not too bad. It's okay. I'm just saying you're not supposed to see a lit wall or anything illuminated without light source beaming on it.

Someone sent me a text while i was playing this game and the ringer volume on my phone was maxed out, i ♥♥♥♥ myself.Suzanne ( the name i gave to the ghost lady ) keeps psssttting me, i pssstt back at her.Phone's wouldent stop ringing in the house, i couldn't even.If you're debating on buying this game but you're too iffy, check out my DAY 6 video, this games deffinitly worth it, sound effects are on point!

Summary (TL;DR): The game is OK. It will (probably) scare you and give you the feeling a horror game should. But if you’re in for a storyline or interesting/innovative gameplay then you’re going to be disappointed with the game.

So I just finished playing this game, so my opinion might be heavily influenced by how the game ended. I will try not to spoil anything in the opener, and talk about the game mechanics first.

Sound: So at first the sound in the game is alright, the music is there to creep you out and create an atmosphere. However, the music is constantly there and it feels out of place at most times. At times, the music will get intense as well, and loud noises will come out of nowhere, which again feels out of place most of the time and is overused in my opinion. There are a lot of sounds that are there to disturb you, example at times you’ll hear footsteps near you, or someone “Psst”-ing. Personally I don’t think these are out of place and makes sense to use, and they aren’t really overused to the point where they become an annoyance

Graphics: Graphics were okay, I don’t have anything to add to this since I didn’t really expect AAA game graphics in the first place. Some textures were weird, but it’s nothing to really focus on.

Gameplay: Gameplay wasn’t that interesting. Opening the same doors to the same rooms every day, trying to find out which room is going to have any “Action” or events happening in them is not as interesting as it may sound. It was alright the first couple of days when there weren’t that many rooms to look through, but once you unlock almost every door it gets irritating to put up with, because the game basically requires that you re-visit every room every day. If you run around confused for a prolonged time, the person you’re controlling will give you a clue, which is nice, but I still feel like it’s annoying that you have to walk around every room all the time.

Level-design: The level design isn’t TOO bad, but it does fall short on some parts. Some rooms connect weirdly, though it does help you getting around the house easily once you have all the doors opened. Still, it’s an annoyance walking around, and you will often find yourself being lost in all the rooms that you can visit, and will probably miss some every now and then. That being said, the rooms were nicely decorated and they helped with the atmosphere.

Atmosphere: So I guess we can all agree that atmosphere is the most important thing in a horror game, and Pineview does get away with it pretty nicely I’d say. There are the annoyingly repetitive sounds I mentioned earlier, but if you look past that, the game does succeed in having that horror feel to it. Some of the props helped nicely and were put to good use. Overall I’d say that Pineview does capture a good scary atmosphere and there’s not a lot to really touch on here.

Story [No spoilers]: So I decided to split this up in to two, because the story annoys me to no end. It starts off by the main person arriving to the house where some stuff has gone down. Linda, the wife I’m assuming, has died in the house and “No one has survived in the house for 30 days” and you have to find out what happened to Linda. Simple stuff, though from there the story kind of falls short, and I can’t go in to detail without spoiling the game, but you basically find letters scattered around the house that tells you what has been going on in the house back when the incident with Linda happened. That’s it, that’s the basic storyline.

Story [SPOILERS]: Right, so moving on, this is where the game falls short and REALLY disappoints me. Note that this section will spoil the entire “Surprise” of the game, so read with caution. During the game you find some notes which help you finding out what happened to Linda, and you find notes explaining what has been going on around the house, like the clown being moved around and then appearing in its original place, and that Linda had been hearing strange noises in the house. Though, the notes doesn’t seem to tell all that much until you start gathering the pieces of a picture, which then reminds the main person about a doll. A doll that is evil, and, assumingly, is buried with Linda. On day 29 you gain access to the cemetery, and enter Linda’s tomb, and in that tomb you’re going to face the game’s biggest disappointment. You’d expect everything to be cleared up, an open ending, or some sort of explanation as to why the house is being haunted, why the clown is moving around, why the scarecrow will chase you, why the shadows of the girls appear at random times or get to know something about Linda’s death. But no. The game ends weirdly, abruptly and in a very strange fashion. As you walk in Linda’s tomb you suddenly find a machine. There’s no explanation as to what this machine does, and you have to turn it on. Once you do, the game ends with a video which I assume is a continued version of the video in the very beginning of the game. This still clears nothing at all, and the machine still feels weirdly out of place.

Edit: This is the first time I have actually taken my time to write a lenghty review for a game, and I would love some feedback. Thanks in advance

I pretty much immediately felt creeped out by the atmosphere of this game, which is a great sign. The aware-of-your-fear mechanic is also really, really cool. 30 mins in and -- even though all I've done was find keys to open doors -- I was visibly frightened. Then for the next three hours, all I did was find more keys to open more doors.

Pineview Drive is an indie haunted house simulator with relatively simple gameplay. Over the span of 30 days, you try and find clues to what happened to your wife, Linda, who disappeared without a trace at an old abandoned estate 20 years ago, for your own closure. To accomplish this you must look around the house, find keys, open doors, and experience a variety of scares and spooks.

And let me restate this point: This game is a haunted house simulator. It's with these expectations that I think the game is best experienced. It's done in a similar vein to the Ju-On The Curse game or the Haunted House mode in the Fatal Frame 2 Wii Remake. Nothing is coming to attack you, there is no hiding mechanic, no enemies to shoot and kill. Your character is slow, can't jump, and gameplay consists of looking for keys/matches/batteries/notes/locked doors, and experiencing events.

On this accord, it does some smart things. Your character does have health even though you're not attacked directly, the health instead is basically responsive to how you react when 'scared' When a scare happens, if you do something with your controls, IE starts shaking your mouse around or suddenly start running or stop running or stop altogether, basically changing the pace of movement you were doing when the scare happens, you'll lose health. How much health you lose is accordant to how extreme/timely your reaction is. This also is all monitored to take note of what you react strongly too and don't and stores that information away to change some minor events. It works well for the most part, though I noticed the game seemingly thinking I was scared of certain events that didn't scare me.

And in my opinion the game works, mainly due to the fact the atmosphere of the game is good and some of the scares did legitimately scare the crap out of me. Scares are subjective, but most games don't scare me, so when one game manages to scare me a few times over the course of the game, I take notice. The atmosphere helps a lot towards this, the rooms look appropriately creepy, the music has good variety and can be good to make you unnerved, along with the type of music you sometimes question if the music is the background music or something happening. The game starts off rather slow with little happening, but escalates as the days go on.

Some scares and moments are obviously inspired by other things however. They're still effective, but can take away from the moment if you recognize the scare's obvious inspiration. Without spoiling too much, there were two scenes that were very obviously inspired by the film, "Ringu", and the game, "Condemned: Criminal Origins." And not all scares were winners, many either left me unphased and some were a bit silly.

On the flip-side, there was some very unique scares in places and some were handled well, and there's a good variety. There's even a few scares and entities that are randomized and can happen anywhere later in the game as you're exploring. Special mention from me goes to a certain clown and scarecrow...

But the game is bogged down by a few problems. Firstly, it's very dark. I had to turn brightness all the way up and it was still super dark. This would be fine, but you don't get your flashlight until a bit into the game, and I found myself stumbling through the dark for a while before I eventually found it. A second flaw is that while new elements get added in scares and the like, the gameplay remains mostly the same, making the later parts sometimes feel rather tedious. On this, in some of the later areas when a lot of the estate is opened up to you, sometimes there's very little indication of where you're supposed to go, leading you to randomly scout rooms to see if you spot any keys or if any events trigger. Spend too long searching, and your character will eventually tell you where to go, but it seems disappointing and not well designed especially since the game at some points does an excellent job at leading you to specific parts of the house with cues, sounds, and graphical things.

Also the last area of the game and the ending are slightly confusing and come out of left field, and I found the last area ended up being kind of trial and error with getting past it as it's a bit too harsh on your health and scares to get through all of it.

Still, it turned out better than I expected and I enjoyed playing it. It reminded me of a game version of those horror movies about characters stupidly staying at an obviously haunted house that gets worse as time goes on. Some good atmosphere and scares steal the show here, even if not all moments are winners. It's held back by a few problems, but if you want a haunted house simulator to play through, this is a pretty solid effort.

I tried to make it through this game in the interest of being open minded and writing a fair review, but it was so mind bogglingly dull I just couldn't take it anymore. The atmosphere and darkness are indeed creepy but the pacing was terrible, and the scares were so laughably unfrightening, few, and far between that it felt like a poor reward for all the aimless circling ( done at a snails pace walk ) to obtain them. I don't mind a slow start but this went on with no clear rise in the pace of activity for 10 agonizingly slow levels. I felt more annoyed than anything as I made my nightly rounds, hoping against hope to stumble across the door behind which something would finally happen quickly. The story is delivered in single sentences and is, so far, too vague and without unity to be engaging. Yeah, yeah, some creepy stuff happened, but there's no character or conflict or mystery or anything motivating me to find out what happens next. If you don't have action or puzzles you have to have a really good story. A game can't sustain interest on atmosphere alone. Perhaps all of these things improve later in the game, but without some kind of hook in the first few levels that teases at something mysterious or surprising or scary or dramatic etc. I have to presume after 10 levels without change that this is what I can expect from the rest of the game.

If you want to see it as a demo of a new horror game mechanism, Pineview Drive is great and could definitely be worth a try. If you're a veteran horror fan and will do anything for a few seconds of real in-game fear, I promise you that you'll get your scares in the first few hours--that alone might be worth the $15 price tag. But as a stand-alone game, judged against other indie horror games out there, Pineview Drive is probably not worth playing. The first few nail-biting days in the mansion had me really optimistic about what was coming next. But the tedious gameplay (plan to walk through pretty every room in the house, multiple times, every day, looking for keys or journal entries), the overused scares, and the lack of a compelling story quickly drained both fear and enjoyment from my experience. The developers themselves defend the lack of story, posting the following in the Steam forums:

#Discussions_QuoteBlock_Author

We are sorry, but this game don´t has a typical ending like "ok look this is the end of the story now and everything was clear from the beginning". The game wants you to come up with own ideas of what really happend.

The problem with a philosophy like this is that it only makes sense if there is enough material in the game for the player to come up with their own version of events (think Home or even Gone Home). This haunted house has little personality of its own, and feels more like being in an amusement park ride than in an actual place with a history. For example, there was one random event that had my character trapped in a room full of clocks, and the ticking seemed to be driving him insane. All the clocks were set to 5:00. Did something happen at 5:00? Is that when I could have killed my wife, or when...something happened? No, it turns out that it was just another random scare, and the clocks were only set to 5:00 because that's where they stall at the end of each day. And I never did find out what my character had done or what happened to him. The events at the end of the game didn't reveal anything.

For an example in contrast: in haunted-house games like Amnesia (both Frictional's original and thechineseroom's sequel), not only is there a coherent story, there are general themes that add to your experience of the environments. Exploitation, torture, loss of children, surveillance, monstrous industry...the simple events of the game are darkly colored by the way your imagination slowly mulls over these ideas as you play. You won't find any deep story elements like that in Pineview Drive. The scary sound is just a scary sound, the scary doll is just a scary doll, and you can be scared or not be scared in the moment--but this isn't a game where you take the fear with you, a game that leaves you lying awake at night, unable to move on to pleasant dreams.

So much wasted potential in this game, which could have been something memorable with an overhaul of the key-hunting gameplay and some love from a writer who cares about telling a good story. I hope the developers learn from this experience and continue to work with their fear mechanic, because it does have a lot of potential. (However, it's also currently imbalanced, making the last day of the game almost impossible to complete.)

I was lucky enough to get a key to the beta and I have played for a few hours. The game creates a good atmosphere and can have you holding your mouse with a death grip. The sound effects in the game are pretty good and do have you jumping in your chair when they spring on you. The game starts off slowly and builds up as you progress. It has some of my own fears present such as toy clowns and creepy ghosts. It is largely using ghosts and paranormal events to scare you while you play. There are thirty days in total that you need to survive. When you die you respawn on the last day that you played. To 'pass' a day you need to find a note left behind by your wife. You get the note by searching the house which seems to have about two dozen locked doors (I'm not even kidding :( ). To open the doors you need to find keys scattered around the map. This can be tricky as the keys are relatively small and you need to find them in the dark with a flashlight.

There hasn't been any real 'direct' attacks on me but the game uses a system in which you lose health if you don't act in a certain manner. An example of this is that if you are near an object such as a piano it will create a loud abrupt sound and measure your reaction. This is a bit of a hit and miss because ignoring the sound doesn't always work, not moving in-game doesn't work, and reacting to the sound doesn't work. It is a weird case when you manage to 'evade' a sound and not lose health. To counter act this you have a lot of health, you regenerate health slowly and these events seem to be placed pretty far apart. The only other issue I have with the game is that it runs pretty badly on my system. It seems pretty system intensive and this leads me to believe that this may just be a lack of optimization in the beta of the game. Hopefully this gets fixed but it may not be possible.

It does what it says on the tin. It is a "one-of-a-kind horror shocker". I would currently give it a 7/10 but I have only made it up to the 8th day. I think the game still has a few tricks left up its sleeve in the remaining 22 days. As I pointed out earlier the game keeps building up and I am pretty sure that my review score will increase as the game progresses.

PLEASE NOTE: Played during Beta and haven't completed the game yet.

EDIT 1: I have completed until day 16 and I would like to change my rating from 7/10 to 8/10. I would go higher then that but the fact that the game still isn't fully optimized is what is bringing it down. The game has become A LOT scarier then it was. I haven't been attacked by a physical being such as in a survival horror game but I am enjoying this far more then I do normal horror games. The game is starting to push some of my personal boundaries and is now a great example of what a horror game can do without having to resort to throwing in jumpscares every five seconds (...Ahem Dead Space). I will keep this review updated as the game gets more patches and I progress further.

EDIT 2: Okay I have completed the game and I want to change my final rating to 6/10. The game had a lot of potential and had some great scares. The game is slow to start which I liked as it builds suspense but the second half of the game fell flat on its face. If the game was maybe just 20 days long it would have been amazing. The game requires you to search 30-40 rooms per day to find the smallest note or clue. This becomes the most frustrating things I have ever had to deal with. The game doesn't usually let you progress until you find a key which is triggered by some jumpscare or scare in the game. This means that everyday you have to wait until nighttime and wander the house until you find the correct event. This means usually 5-10 minutes of waiting for something to happen EVERYDAY. Just start the each new day during the night and it would have been much better. The game got buggier as you got closer to the end of the game. On the 29th day just as I was finishing the day I fell through the ground, never to be heard from again. As well I had to repeat the entire day. The final day which is the game's conclusion was too drawn out for me and took WAY too long to complete. I died once and had to repeat a lot of triggered events to return to my deathpoint. The ending was confusing and I'm not entirely sure what actually happened. Other bugs that annoyed me was one of the enemies being able to hit me through walls and floating objects or textures that made no sense (they looked like part of trees inside the house). The game being aware if you were scared failed to work more then a handful of times (I mean maybe twice in the entire game it actually worked). The game is still not optimized and it meant that it ran pretty badly the entire way through. As well the game had some really bad attempts at jumpscares or scares and some of them were repetitive by the end of the game. The only reason I still recommend this game is because the game has some truly terrifying scares for me. It was far more pscychological then I imagined, using my own imagination to scare me instead of actual jumpscares. Overall the game was okay but if the game was shorter and included the scarier bits I would have been far more satisfied with the game.

I am mixed on this one. While I found certain aspects to be unique, I found most of the game to be boring and not scary at all. Running around trying to find keys and notes got tedious after day 6. I was hoping for some new challenges and puzzles after this point but they never came. The story line was never a story but merely just a prod to keep you feeling engrossed. I played til the end and was more dissapointed at myself for playing along with the game hoping things got better. They never did. The concept was good but somehow I did not feel entertained. Rather, I felt imprisoned by trying to justify why I just spent $15.

About The Game:Pineview Drive is a game that is designed to be a story driven thriller, it's designed to make you think that something isn't quite right and that if you round the next corner something may jump out at you. In most cases this is correct & every door is a new gateway into hell.

While this game is designed on Horror there's nothing in it that can physically hurt your character, there is only mental tricks that can end the game & in a majority of those cases the game pulls this off quite well with its sharp and shrill audio tones, it's nice graphics during the day and night & many other things that this game did well to capture the immersion.

It's a rather enjoyable experience & it's also quite a long experience with 30 days to play through & each of those days becomes a little more intense.

The Review:Pineview Drive is a well paced & well designed peice of Software that performs nicely & manages to capture you with it's good horror designs but it's story is pretty average.

There are so many things that were good and bad about this game but where to start?

For starters i think we should get the story out of the road.

The Story:The Story has you (the main character) attempting to figure out what happened to your wife and why she went missing at the Mansion.

Maybe it was something i missed or maybe because by the end of the game things felt a bit meh & i stopped caring so much but i was still left not understanding what the hell happened to her. All i got was a cinematic of you holding something and her running away into the forest, is this supposed to explain to me what happened? Cause it's done a bad job explaining.

Overall the story is pretty poor, but what about the rest of the game?

The Gameplay:The gameplay of this game is very similar to other Horror games you are required to find different keys and items to help you progress in the game, but here's where things change a bit unlike general Horror Games this one doesn't rely on monsters to scare you it rely's on your reactions to random noises or ghostly figures to do the damage rather than a monster chasing you down the corridor and needing to hide.

Although this mechanic is good and worked well, this game really needed more to it rather than just reaction avoidance. Most of the time i'd rather have reacted to the thing that made the noise and relied on it to scare me rather than "oh something made a noise better not look or it'll cause me to lose sanity". They could have REALLY done something great here and instead of just losing health with no signs of what caused it, they could used these ques to generate a random Ghost or something of that nature to terrify the player. (Really disappointed about that).

The dark atmosphere in this game is superb but it was lacking a few things here and there that could've made the game better, the more you played the game the more obvious it become that things weren't going to change up much after the power goes out and you have to rely on the Flashlight or Matches to light candles. This would have been PERFECT if and only IF you used the power outage much later in the game when things started to get more scary.

One thing this game did pretty nicely was the fact that it made sure you didn't miss the bigger scares because every night you had to find the biggest scares to progress further and collect the valuable keys you needed to open locked doors and find the diary entries. (Good Idea!)

The Good:This game had potential to be something more and sometimes it showed like the new feature of using just scares to make you go insane rather than using a random monster.

Or it's unique idea of not just relying on jump scares all the time but actually making sure you're getting scared by forcing you to endure them to find the keys.

Using a pretty normal setting not like most settings and making it creepy with atmosphere and not just a run down old building.

The Bad:Not branching out much and after a while things got pretty repeatative, not enough variation with the scares.

Around about the last 5 days things seemed to start being rushed it took maby a minute to complete them from 25 - 29, 3 of the days from 26 - 29 involved finding a peice of photo with absolutely no new scares to endure between finding them? Come on seriously it's meant to be a horror game not a find and seek game.

Removing players use of interactive light switches too early in the game to increase the scare factor before things actually started to get scary, it would have been better removed after the scary stuff really began around day 15 or so.

No clues as to where you are supposed to go or what you're meant to be doing until the clock reaches 5:00AM it really doesn't help, try adding a quick vocal que to the beginning giving the player just a little hint as to what they should be doing.

It changed from day to night really quickly, like 2 minutes of day and about 20 minutes of night or so, and once you reach a certain point in time at about 5:00AM ingame time the clock just stops, you really could have used this feature much better and made it a time limit, if you missedthe deadline then you miss part of the story and won't get the full picture of what happened.

The Verdict:Although i did enjoy the experience of this game it's going to receive a very low score because there was just so much more i expected from this and didn't end up receiving it.

I give this game a 5/10 because while it brought something new and interesting to try & experience there was just too late here to warrent anything more than a 5.

There was scares, i did jump a few times but more often than not i ended up just walking around going "Oh was that meant to be scary?" As i said earlier in the review instead of expecting people to not react to the games scares you should have expected them to react and then used this to generate a more terrifying experience.

While the game had beautiful graphics for the most part, it was a bit lacking in other parts the lighting and the atmosphere during the night was great & the transition between day and night was beautiful to watch.

Do I Recommend This Game?:I find it hard to recommend this game due to the fact that there was just so many things that could have been there to make it a more enjoyable experience but for the most part it was just lacking in things to make it scary.

If you think you'll enjoy it then give it a go but don't expect much unless you're easily scared.